1. Field of the Inventon
This invention relates to subsea communication.
2. Description of Related Art
There are a wide variety of different circumstances in which it is desirable to be able to communicate between bodies in a subsea environment. The term subsea is used in this application as this is conventional terminology, however, it should be appreciated that the term subsea encompasses any underwater situation.
A specific example of where subsea communication is important is in the operation of tetherless Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) and tethered remotely operated vehicles (ROVs). Such vehicles need to be controlled and the data which they gather needs to be extracted. It is preferable if this control and extraction of data can be done on a regular basis (perhaps in real time) and without the need for a physical connection between the vehicle and, say, a surface vessel and without the need to bring the vehicle back to the surface vessel.
Various means of communication between AUV's and other locations have been investigated. One possibility is acoustic transmission but this suffers from difficulties because of noise generated by the fans which drive the AUV.